One of the records I bought in New Zealand was Feelstyle’s album Break it to Pieces. It’s pretty much been on the turntable nonstop since. A superb record.

Su’amalie - Feelstyle (click play to watch or go here)

Deirdre is a former Marks and Spencer mannequin who had been quietly working out her retirement at Camellotment, the garden plot out the back of Cannon Hill Park tended by our friends Craig, Robson and Val (to my knowledge, the only allotment in Birmingham with its own blog).

Before moving to Camellotment, Deirdre had lived for a couple of years in our flat after having been rescued from a skip and brought home on a number 50 bus. She was perfectly happy in her new role as armless yet glamorous scarecrow, and now… someone has kidnapped her.

Worse than that. They’ve taken what seems to have been a hacksaw and have lopped her off at the knees and carted her away. No random act - this was a deliberate and planned abduction.

She was last seen at Plot 171 of the Moor Green Allotment Club in Cannon Hill, Edgebaston.

If you have any information as to the whereabouts of Deirdre, please get in touch.

First, can I just say OH MY GOD IT’S COLD!

I wasn’t expecting to feel it quite as much as I am. I’ve had three winters to acclimatise myself to sub-zero temperatures, and New Zealand was hardly in the midst of a tropical summer while I was there, but for some reason, coming back has been a bit of a shock to the system.

It was with this reluctance to brave the elements, accompanied with a fair degree of residual jetlag that I went with Bobbie to a very grown-up dinner party that had been arranged in my absence.

‘Patrick‘, the nice Irishman who voices the SatNav device I bought Bobbie as an emergency early Christmas present, and who saves us from our complete navigational incompetence, brought us to a place we would never have otherwise located in Harborne. It’s the home of Morag, a former customer of Sage Wholefoods who has become a very good friend of Bobbie’s.

Morag’s a psychiatrist and, as it turns out, an amazing cook. She introduced us to her partner Simon, a medieval historian who specialises in miracles, pilgrimmages and saints; Alan, a philosopher and staff member of the Bodleian Library; and Phllippa, a specialist in Old English literature.

The food was great and the conversation was fascinating. Most interesting to me was the way in which these different disciplines saw each other and, somehow, connected up. I’ve had so little exposure to psychiatry, medieval religious history, philosophy of mind and Anglo-Saxon literature that I felt a bit like a naive tourist trying to identify landmarks and find my way from point A to point B. But the areas of common ground were pretty clear, as were the issues of contention.

I won’t try and reproduce the conversation here, but what I got out of it was the extent to which everyone was interested in the ways in which we make sense of the world, the stories we tell ourselves, the relationship between those narratives and the contemporary cosmology, and the extent to which we can aspire to some sort of objective truth about who we are, where we are and what we think we’re doing.

It was a fascinating discussion, and I was only really able to keep up and stay involved by asking one guest how their field connected with something that another guest had just said. That, and smiling and nodding, was my key strategy.

These people completely inhabited their particular fields and knew the terrain like the backs of their hands. I was just visiting, having a look around and trying to make sense of the landscape. The tourist.

But along the way, the practice of blogging came up. The historian, in particular, was cautious about it. And there were a number of really interesting questions to address in that regard.

The first was the very reasonable ‘what’s the point?’, which is actually quite a hard question to answer when it’s been asked by an academic whose role is to further knowledge, and whose own writings are subject to quite intense scrutiny before publication. There is a central conceit with blogging that suggests that you think that what you have to say is worthy of publication. Sure, keep a diary, but why tell the world? To an academic writer, the act of writing is to commit yourself to a position and to be held accountable to it. To treat writing otherwise is to lack respect for the written word.

The second was ‘where’s the line?’. There’s a sense that most people feel the need to draw a distinct division between their private life and their public ‘blogged’ life. Some things are off limits and some things are open for inspection. I don’t happen to have that clear divide in the same way, and approach the problem slightly differently.

The third was ‘how do you manage it?’. A lot of people think that writing — particularly creative writing — is difficult. That creativity is something that some people have and others don’t, and that stringing sentences together is an ordeal… especially when there’s a possibility that others might read it.

And to me, these have become, over the past five or so years, quite simple to answer.

A blog is a conversation. It’s not journalism or reportage, and nor is it trying to capture history — personal, social or otherwise. It’s not trying to be important, reliable or even particularly useful. The idea that somebody might be reading gives you a fairly compelling reason to try and be interesting (which is different from being ‘merely entertaining’), and hopefully sharpens the writing along the way.

But blogging is not important, dangerous or difficult.

Blogging is like talking. The people who find you interesting for some reason will tend to hang around and hear what you have to say, occasionally respond, and might even remember things you said to bring up later in another conversation. It’s no more difficult or problematic than phoning someone and telling them about your day. Of course, it generally involves typing rather than speaking, and every medium brings its own rules to bear on the communicative process, but there’s nothing particularly troubling about other casual forms of communication. It’s just that this one is easily confused with the more formal genres typical of printed communication.

But that said, it acts as history too. Collectively, the outpourings of the masses are being archived into a massive digital Alexandrian Library. Mostly, it’s full of inane crap, sure - but you can be certain that the wisdom of this age is in there somewhere, and whatever truths it can reveal are there ready to be teased out by some future historian who, like never before, will have access to the minutiae of the lives and times of the people who lived.

Its purpose is also partly to think out loud in the manner of a talking therapy or a Shakespearian soliloquy in which the character overhears himself thinking in a particular way and comes to a new realisation about the world and his place in it.

And it’s the context in which we can come to terms with what we think and what we mean. At best, blogging is interpreting the world around us, attaching our own symbols and, in a sense, engaging in the kind of personal myth-making that lies at the heart of the kinds of activities that historians, philosophers, literary critics and doctors of the mind have interested themselves in all along.

But above all, blogging, in a sense, is a little like holding a dinner party. You get to set the context, the decor and the direction of the conversation. Your guests can weigh in, but they’ve come to your house and should behave accordingly. When things are going well, what gets served up has been well-prepared, the visitors are satisfied, the conversation is engaging and the people get on in such a way that they can feel comfortable questioning, challenging and learning from each other.

That’s when you can be reasonably certain you’ve had a very successful dinner party.

Like the one we went to last night.

View over Shiraz Mountains, Iran

27 hours in a plane later, and Jake and I are safe and sound back home in Birmingham. We flew Emirates, watched a bunch of movies and TV shows on the way, had decent meals and surprisingly adequate legroom for economy class. In fact, compare that to my recent return home from foreign parts on another airline, and the service was absolutely superb.

We had an amazing time in New Zealand: saw a lot of people we really wanted to see; did a bunch of things we really wanted to do; and bought a lot of things only a tourist would spend money on. Filled an entire empty suitcase with gifts and bits and pieces that had been requested or seemed appropriate.

I’m absolutely wiped now - it’s early evening Birmingham time, but my brain is convinced I’ve been up for two days, and it’s now around 6am.

Really appreciate everyone’s hospitality while we were back. I’m now going to spend a few days unscrambling my brain.

Auckland viaduct city view

The last couple of days in New Zealand have seen a decided ramping up of people and places to visit. As the final day approaches, there’s been an increase in activity, and so a decrease in the amount of downtime in which to blog about it.

I’ve met with a lot of people and seen a lot of cool things while I’ve been here, so this can serve as a bit of an overview - one last postcard (or rather - a packet of postcards) to send before I leave.

For my friends in the UK, the scenery and backgrounds might be of exotic interest. For my New Zealand friends, there’ll be some familiar faces and places. For you and me, this is a quick catch up on some people and sites of interest I’ve squeezed into the last day or so, before I spend 26 hours in a metal tube, hurtling across the sky.

Here’s the last bunch of postcards. Wrap them up in a rubber band and stick them in the shoebox:

Gateway to the Peter Blake Sailing School

Kitesurfing at Long Beach

Jake and Jo out for a stroll

Hanging at Matt’s place in Northcote

Trevor and Peter

Coffee with Stinky Jim and SJD

Jake and the cafe cat at One 2 One (formerly Atomic)

Coffee with Paul

Lee at Mum & Dad’s place

A place you can drink beer

Auckland’s Skytower

George FM Christmas Party at Bungalow 8 at the Viaduct

Street scene, South Auckland

Hard to Find Bookshop, Onehunga

Onehunga Mall

Maori Television, Newmarket

Church

Pohutukawa sculpture at Nelson St Interchange

Auckland Museum

Sunken Building, Ponsonby

Still have a few people to meet up with, but I have to go pack first, and then buy the last few souvenirs, and I think between that and racing out to the airport, that’ll have to do until you pop over for a slide show and a wee dram of duty free whisky.